This section describes the basic things you can do after the emulator has been fired up.
When the emulator is run, the screen of the emulated machine is displayed in a standard X Window which we will call the emulation window. This window will be updated in real-time, displaying the same contents that a real monitor or TV set would.
Under the emulation window there is an area which is used to display information about the state of the emulator; we will call this area the status bar.
On the extreme left of the status bar, there is a performance meter. The performance meter displays the current relative speed (in percent) of the emulator and the update frequency, in frames per second. All the machines emulated are PAL, so the update frequency will be of 50 frames per second if your system is fast enough to allow the emulator to run at the speed of the real machine.
On the extreme right of the status bar, there is a drive status indicator. This is only visible if the hardware-level ("True") 1541 emulation is turned on. In that case, the drive status indicator will contain a rectangle which emulates the drive LED and will display the current track position of the read-write head of the drive.
It is possible to execute some commands and change emulation parameters while running the emulator: two menus are available by pressing the right or left mouse buttons while the pointer is in the emulation window. The left mouse button will open the command menu from which several emulation-related commands can be executed; the right mouse button will open the setting menu, from which emulation parameters can be changed. The basic difference between the command and the setting menu is that, while commands have only effect on the current session, settings can be saved for later use: this can be done with the "Save settings" and "Load settings" right-button menu items. "Restore default settings" restores the factory defaults. See section 6 Settings and resources for more information about how settings work in VICE.
Sometimes commands can be reached via shortcuts or hotkeys, i.e. it is possible to reach them by pressing a sequence of keys instead of going through the menu with the mouse; when this happens, the corresponding shortcut is displayed in parenthesis on the right of the menu item. In VICE, all the shortcuts must begin with the Meta or Alt key. So, for example, to attach a disk image to drive #8 (the corresponding menu item displays "M-8"), you have to press the Meta (or Alt) and then 8.
Notice that, while Meta or Alt is pressed, pressing other keys has no effect at all on the emulated machine.
In case you suddenly get stuck or do not remember how to do a certain thing, you can in any moment use the "Browse manuals" command (left button menu). This will popup a browser and open the HTML version of this documentation. Notice that this requires VICE to be properly (and fully) installed with a `make install'.
The browser can be specified via the HTMLBrowserCommand string
resource (see section 6 Settings and resources for information about
resources). Every `%s' in the string will be replaced with a URL
to the VICE HTML pages.
In those situations where it is necessary to specify a file name, all of the VICE emulators will pop up a file selector window which allows you to select one file interactively.
On the left of the file selector, there is a list of ancestor directories: by clicking on them, you can go up the directory tree. On the right, there is a list of the files in the current directory; files can be selected by clicking on them. If you click on a directory, that directory becomes the current one; if you click on an ordinary file, it becomes active.
On the top, there are a directory box, with the complete path of the current directory, and a file name box, with the name of the file you are selecting. On the bottom there are two buttons: "OK" confirms the selected file and "Cancel" abandons the file selector without cancelling the operation.
It is also possible to specify what files you want to show in the file selector by writing an appropriate shell-like pattern in the directory box; eg. `~/*.[dx]64' will only show files in the home directory whose name ends with `.d64' or `*.x64'.
The emulator is able to emulate disk drives and (read-only) tape recorders if provided with suitable disk images or tape images. An image is a raw dump of the contents of the media, and must be attached before the emulator can use it. "Attaching" a disk or tape image is like "virtually" inserting a diskette or a cassette into the disk drive or the tape recorder: after an image is attached, the emulator is able to use it as a storage media.
There are five commands (in the left button menu) that deal with disk and tape images:
The first four commands are used to insert and remove the virtual disks and cassette tapes from the respective units. On the other hand, the last commands tries to guess the type of the image you are attaching from its name and size, and attaches it to the most reasonable device.
Supported formats are D64 and X64 for disk images (devices
8, 9 and 10) and T64 for tape images. Notice that T64
support is read-only, and that the cassette is automatically
rewound from the start when you reach the end.
Another important feature is that raw Commodore BASIC binary files and .P00 files can be attached as tapes. As you can autostart a tape image when it is attached (see section 5.5.2 "Autostarting" an image), this allows you to autostart these particular files as well.
You can attach a disk for which you do have write permissions: when this
happens, the 1541 emulator will emulate a write-protected disk. This is
also useful if you want to preserve certain disk image from being
written to; in the latter case, just remove the write permission for
that file, eg. doing a chmod a-w.
It is possible to look into the disk or tape image and see its directory before attaching it: to do so, just press the "Contents" button in the file selector window. This way, a new window will be popped up with the contents of the selected image.
Notice that this function automatically translates the directory from PETSCII to ASCII; but, due to differences in the two encodings, it is not always possible to translate all the characters, so you might get funny results when "weird" characters such as the semi-graphical ones are being used.
If you want to reset the machine and run the first program on a certain image without typing any commands at the Commodore BASIC prompt, you can use the "Autostart" button in the file selector window after selecting a proper disk or tape image file.
Notice that, if true 1541 emulation is turned on, it will be turned off before running the program and then turned on again after it has been loaded. This way, you get the maximum possible speed while loading the file, but you don't loose compatibility when the actual program is running.
This method is not completely safe, because some autostarting methods might cause the true 1541 emulation not to be turned on again. In such cases, the best thing to do is to disable kernal traps (which will cause true 1541 emulation to be always kept turned on), or to manually load the program with true 1541 emulation turned on.
It is also possible to attach disk or tape images that have been compressed through various algorithms; the compression format is recognized from the file extension. The following formats are supported (the expected file name extension is in parenthesis):
.gz or .z);
.bz2);
.zip);
.tar.gz, .tgz);
.zoo).
PkZip, tar.gz, lha and zoo support is
read-only and always uses the first T64 or
D64 file in the archive. So archives containing multiple files
will always be handled as if they contained one single file.
Since version 0.15, the VICE emulators are able to attach disks packed
with Zipcoded or Lynx without the need of converting them into
D64 or X64 files with c1541. This is done by
executing c1541, letting it decode the file into a temporary
image, and then by attaching the temporary image read-only. For this
reason, the directory c1541 is contained in must be in your
PATH.
This uses the -unlynx and -zcreate options of c1541
(see section 9.1 c1541 commands and options); these commands are not very
reliable yet, and could fail with certain kinds of Lynx and Zipcode
images (for example, they cannot deal with DEL files properly).
So please use with care.
Lynx files usually come as `.lnx' files and are depacked into a single disk. On the other hand, Zipcode files do not have a particular extension (although `.z64' is sometimes used), and represent a disk by means of four sub-files, named as follows:
If you attach as a disk image (or smart-attach) any of these files, the emulator will simply pick up the other three parts (by looking at the name) and build one disk image out of them.
You can reset the emulated machine at any time by using the "Reset" command from the command menu. There are two types of reset:
A soft reset is the same as a hardware reset achieved by pulling the RESET line down; a hard reset is more like a power on/power off sequence, which makes sure the whole RAM is cleared.
It is possible that a soft reset is not enough to bring the machine back to the OS initialization sequence: in such cases, you have to do a hard reset instead.
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